William James

First published Thu Sep 7, 2000; substantive revision Fri Oct 20, 2017

William James was an original thinker in and between the disciplines of physiology,
psychology and philosophy. His twelve-hundred page masterwork, The Principles of
Psychology (1890), is a rich blend of physiology, psychology, philosophy, and
personal reflection that has given us such ideas as “the stream of thought” and the
baby’s impression of the world “as one great blooming, buzzing confusion” (PP 462).
It contains seeds of pragmatism and phenomenology, and influenced generations of
thinkers in Europe and America, including Edmund Husserl, Bertrand Russell, John
Dewey, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. James studied at Harvard’s Lawrence Scientific
School and the School of Medicine, but his writings were from the outset as much
philosophical as scientific. “Some Remarks on Spencer’s Notion of Mind as
Correspondence” (1878) and “The Sentiment of Rationality” (1879, 1882) presage his
future pragmatism and pluralism, and contain the first statements of his view that
philosophical theories are reflections of a philosopher’s temperament.

James hints at his religious concerns in his earliest essays and in The Principles,
but they become more explicit in The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular
Philosophy (1897), Human Immortality: Two Supposed Objections to the Doctrine
(1898), The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) and A Pluralistic Universe
(1909). James oscillated between thinking that a “study in human nature” such as
Varieties could contribute to a “Science of Religion” and the belief that religious
experience involves an altogether supernatural domain, somehow inaccessible to
science but accessible to the individual human subject.

James made some of his most important philosophical contributions in the last
decade of his life. In a burst of writing in 1904–5 (collected in Essays in Radical
Empiricism (1912)) he set out the metaphysical view most commonly known as “neutral
monism,” according to which there is one fundamental “stuff” that is neither
material nor mental. In “A Pluralistic Universe” he defends the mystical and anti-
pragmatic view that concepts distort rather than reveal reality, and in his
influential Pragmatism (1907), he presents systematically a set of views about
truth, knowledge, reality, religion, and philosophy that permeate his writings from
the late 1870s onwards.

1. Chronology of James’s Life

2. Early Writings
“Remarks on Spencer’s Definition of Mind as Correspondence” (1878)
“The Sentiment of Rationality” (1879, 1882)
3. The Principles of Psychology
4. Essays in Popular Philosophy
5. The Varieties of Religious Experience
6. Late Writings
Pragmatism (1907)
A Pluralistic Universe (1909)
Essays in Radical Empiricism (1912)
Bibliography
Primary Literature: Works by William James
Secondary Literature
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1. Chronology of James’s Life

1842. Born in New York City, first child of Henry James and Mary Walsh. James.
Educated by tutors and at private schools in New York.
 1843. Brother Henry born.
1848. Sister Alice born.
1855–8. Family moves to Europe. William attends school in Geneva, Paris, and
Boulogne-sur-Mer; develops interests in painting and science.
1858. Family settles in Newport, Rhode Island, where James studies painting
with William Hunt.
1859–60. Family settles in Geneva, where William studies science at Geneva
Academy; then returns to Newport when William decides he wishes to resume his study
of painting.
1861. William abandons painting and enters Lawrence Scientific School at
Harvard.
1864. Enters Harvard School of Medicine.
1865. Joins Amazon expedition of his teacher Louis Agassiz, contracts a mild
form of smallpox, recovers and travels up the Amazon, collecting specimens for
Agassiz’s zoological museum at Harvard.
1866. Returns to medical school. Suffers eye strain, back problems, and
suicidal depression in the fall.
1867–8. Travels to Europe for health and education: Dresden, Bad Teplitz,
Berlin, Geneva, Paris. Studies physiology at Berlin University, reads philosophy,
psychology and physiology (Wundt, Kant, Lessing, Goethe, Schiller, Renan,
Renouvier).
1869. Receives M. D. degree, but never practices. Severe depression in the
fall.
1870–1. Depression and poor health continue.
1872. Accepts offer from President Eliot of Harvard to teach undergraduate
course in comparative physiology.
1873. Accepts an appointment to teach full year of anatomy and physiology, but
postpones teaching for a year to travel in Europe.
1874–5. Begins teaching psychology; establishes first American psychology
laboratory.
1878. Marries Alice Howe Gibbens. Publishes “Remarks on Spencer’s Definition of
Mind as Correspondence” in Journal of Speculative Philosophy.
1879. Publishes “The Sentiment of Rationality” in Mind.
1880. Appointed Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Harvard. Continues to
teach psychology.
1882. Travels to Europe. Meets with Ewald Hering, Carl Stumpf, Ernst Mach,
Wilhelm Wundt, Joseph Delboeuf, Jean Charcot, George Croom Robertson, Shadworth
Hodgson, Leslie Stephen.
1884. Lectures on “The Dilemma of Determinism” and publishes “On Some Omissions
of Introspective Psychology” in Mind.
1885–92. Teaches psychology and philosophy at Harvard: logic, ethics, English
empirical philosophy, psychological research.
1890. Publishes The Principles of Psychology with Henry Holt of Boston, twelve
years after agreeing to write it.
1892. Publishes Psychology: Briefer Course with Henry Holt.
1897. Publishes The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy,
with Longmans, Green & Co. Lectures on “Human Immortality” (published in 1898).
1898. Identifies himself as a pragmatist in “Philosophical Conceptions and
Practical Results,” given at the University of California, Berkeley. Develops heart
problems.
1899. Publishes Talks to Teachers on Psychology: and to Students on Some of
Life’s Ideals (including “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings” and “What Makes
Life Worth Living?”) with Henry Holt. Becomes active member of the Anti-
Imperialist League, opposing U. S. policy in Philippines.
1901–2. Delivers Gifford lectures on “The Varieties of Religious Experience” in
Edinburgh (published in 1902).
1904–5 Publishes “Does ‘Consciousness’ Exist?,” “A World of Pure Experience,”
“How Two Minds Can Know the Same Thing,” “Is Radical Empiricism Solipsistic?” and
“The Place of Affectional Facts in a World of Pure Experience” in Journal of
Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods. All were reprinted in Essays in
Radical Empiricism (1912).
1907. Resigns Harvard professorship. Publishes Pragmatism: A New Name for Some
Old Ways of Thinking with Longmans, Green & Co., based on lectures given in Boston
and at Columbia.
1909. Publishes A Pluralistic Universe with Longmans, Green & Co., based on
Hibbert Lectures delivered in England and at Harvard the previous year.
1910. Publishes “A Pluralistic Mystic” in Hibbert Journal. Abandons attempt to
complete a “system” of philosophy. (His partially completed manuscript published
posthumously as Some Problems of Philosophy). Dies of heart failure at summer home
in Chocorua, New Hampshire.

2. Early Writings
“Remarks on Spencer’s Definition of Mind as Correspondence” (1878)

Although he was officially a professor of psychology when he published it, James’s

discussion of Herbert Spencer broaches characteristic themes of his philosophy: the
importance of religion and the passions, the variety of human responses to life,
and the idea that we help to “create” the truths that we “register” (E 21). Taking
up Spencer’s view that the adjustment of the organism to the environment is the
basic feature of mental evolution, James charges that Spencer projects his own
vision of what ought to be onto the phenomena he claims to describe. Survival,
James asserts, is merely one of many interests human beings have: “The social
affections, all the various forms of play, the thrilling intimations of art, the
delights of philosophic contemplation, the rest of religious emotion, the joy of
moral self-approbation, the charm of fancy and of wit—some or all of these are
absolutely required to make the notion of mere existence tolerable;…” (E 13). We
are all teleological creatures at base, James holds, each with a set of a priori
values and categories. Spencer “merely takes sides with the telos he happens to
prefer” (E 18).

James’s characteristic empiricism appears in his claim that values and categories
fight it out in the course of human experience, and that their conflicts “can only
be solved ambulando, and not by any a priori definition.” The “formula which proves
to have the most massive destiny,” he concludes, “will be the true one” (E 17). Yet
James wishes to defend his sense that any such formulation will be determined as
much by a freely-acting human mind as by the world, a position he later (in
Pragmatism) calls “humanism”: “there belongs to mind, from its birth upward, a
spontaneity, a vote. It is in the game, and not a mere looker-on; and its judgments
of the should-be, its ideals, cannot be peeled off from the body of the cogitandum
as if they were excrescences…” (E 21).
“The Sentiment of Rationality” (1879, 1882)

The substance of this essay was first published in Mind in 1879 and in the
Princeton Review in 1882, and then republished in The Will to Believe and Other
Essays in Popular Philosophy in 1897. Although he never quite says that rationality
is a sentiment, James holds that a sentiment—really a set of sentiments—is a “mark”
of rationality. The philosopher, James writes, will recognize the rationality of a
conception “as he recognizes everything else, by certain subjective marks with
which it affects him. When he gets the marks, he may know that he has got the
rationality.” These marks include a “strong feeling of ease, peace, rest” (WB 57),
and a “feeling of the sufficiency of the present moment, of its absoluteness” (WB
58). There is also a “passion for parsimony” (WB 58) that is felt in grasping
theoretical unifications, as well as a passion for distinguishing, a “loyalty to
clearness and integrity of perception, dislike of blurred outlines, of vague
identifications” (WB 59). The ideal philosopher, James holds, blends these two
passions of rationality, and even some great philosophers go too far in one
direction or another: Spinoza’s unity of all things in one substance is “barren,”
as is Hume’s “‘looseness and separateness’ of everything…” (WB 60).
Sentiments of rationality operate not just in logic or science, but in ordinary
life. When we first move into a room, for example, “we do not know what draughts
may blow in upon our back, what doors may open, what forms may enter, what
interesting objects may be found in cupboards and corners.” These minor
uncertainties act as “mental irritant[s],” which disappear when we come to know our
way around the room, to “feel at home” there (WB 67–8).

James begins the second part of his essay by considering the case when “two
conceptions [are] equally fit to satisfy the logical demand” for fluency or
unification. At this point, he holds, one must consider a “practical” component of
rationality. The conception that “awakens the active impulses, or satisfies other
aesthetic demands better than the other, will be accounted the more rational
conception, and will deservedly prevail” (WB 66). James puts the point both as one
of psychology—a prediction of what will occur—and as one of judgment, for he holds
that it will prevail “deservedly.”

As in his essay on Spencer, James explores the relations between temperaments and
philosophical theorizing. Idealism, he holds, “will be chosen by a man of one
emotional constitution, materialism by another.” Idealism offers a sense of
intimacy with the universe, the feeling that ultimately I “am all.” But
materialists find in idealism “a narrow, close, sick-room air,” and prefer to
conceive of an uncertain, dangerous and wild universe that has “no respect for our
ego.” Let “the tides flow,” the materialist thinks, “even though they flow over us”
(WB 76). James is sympathetic both to the idea that the universe is something we
can be intimate with and to the idea that it is wild and unpredictable. If he
criticizes idealism for its “sick-room air,” he criticizes reductive forms of
materialism for denying to “our most intimate powers…all relevancy in universal
affairs” (WB 71). The intimacy and the wildness portrayed in these contrasting
philosophies answer to propensities, passions, and powers in human beings, and the
“strife” of these two forms of “mental temper,” James predicts, will always be seen
in philosophy (WB 76). Certainly it is always seen in the philosophy of William
James.
3. The Principles of Psychology

In 1878, James agreed to write a psychology textbook for the American publisher
Henry Holt, but it took him twelve years to produce the manuscript, and when he did
he described it to Holt as “a loathsome, distended, tumefied, bloated, dropsical
mass, testifying to nothing but two facts: 1st, that there is no such thing as a
science of psychology, and 2nd, that W. J. is an incapable” (The Letters of William
James, ed. Henry James. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1926, pp. 393–4). Nevertheless,
this thousand page volume of psychology, physiology and philosophy has proved to be
James’s masterwork, containing early statements of his main philosophical ideas in
extraordinarily rich chapters on “The Stream of Thought,” “The Consciousness of
Self,” “Emotion,” “Will,” and many other topics.

James tells us that he will follow the psychological method of introspection in The
Principles, which he defines as “the looking into our own minds and reporting what
we there discover” (PP 185). In fact he takes a number of methodological approaches
in the book. Early on, he includes chapters on “The Functions of the Brain” and “On
Some General Conditions of Brain Activity” that reflect his years as a lecturer in
anatomy and physiology at Harvard, and he argues for the reductive and materialist
thesis that habit is “at bottom a physical principle” (PP 110). As the book moves
along, he involves himself in discussions with philosophers—for example with Hume
and Kant in his hundred-page chapter on the self, and he finds himself making
metaphysical claims that anticipate his later pragmatism, as when he writes: “There
is no property ABSOLUTELY essential to any one thing. The same property which
figures as the essence of a thing on one occasion becomes a very inessential
feature on the other” (PP 959).
Even “introspection” covers a range of reports. James discusses the experiments
that his contemporaries Wundt, Stumpf and Fechner were performing in their
laboratories, which led them to results such as that “sounds are less delicately
discriminated in intensity than lights” (PP 513). But many of James’s most
important and memorable introspective observations come from his own life. For
example:

The rhythm of a lost word may be there without a sound to clothe it…. Everyone
must know the tantalizing effect of the blank rhythm of some forgotten verse,
restlessly dancing in one’s mind, striving to be filled out with words (PP 244).

Our father and mother, our wife and babes, are bone of our bone and flesh of
our flesh. When they die, a part of our very selves is gone. If they do anything
wrong, it is our shame. If they are insulted, our anger flashes forth as readily as
if we stood in their place. (PP 280).

There is an excitement during the crying fit which is not without a certain
pungent pleasure of its own; but it would take a genius for felicity to discover
any dash of redeeming quality in the feeling of dry and shrunken sorrow (PP 1061).

“Will you or won’t you have it so?” is the most probing question we are ever
asked; we are asked it every hour of the day, and about the largest as well as the
smallest, the most theoretical as well as the most practical, things. We answer by
consents or non-consents and not by words. What wonder that these dumb responses
should seem our deepest organs of communication with the nature of things! (PP, p.
1182).

In this last quotation, James tackles a philosophical problem from a psychological

perspective. Although he refrains from answering the question of whether these
“responses” are in fact deep organs of communication with the nature of things—
reporting only that they seem to us to be so—in his later writings, such as
Varieties of Religious Experience and A Pluralistic Universe, he confesses, and to
some degree defends, his belief that the question should be answered affirmatively.

In the deservedly famous chapter on “The Stream of Thought” James takes himself to
be offering a richer account of experience than those of traditional empiricists
such as Hume. He believes relations, vague fringes, and tendencies are experienced
directly (a view he would later defend as part of his “radical empiricism.”) James
finds consciousness to be a stream rather than a succession of “ideas.” Its waters
blend, and our individual consciousness—or, as he prefers to call it sometimes, our
“sciousness”—is “steeped and dyed” in the waters of sciousness or thought that
surround it. Our psychic life has rhythm: it is a series of transitions and
resting-places, of “flights and perchings” (PP 236). We rest when we remember the
name we have been searching for; and we are off again when we hear a noise that
might be the baby waking from her nap.

Interest—and its close relative, attention—is a major component not only of James’s
psychology, but of the epistemology and metaphysics that seep into his discussion.
A thing, James states in “The Stream of Thought,” is a group of qualities “which
happen practically or aesthetically to interest us, to which we therefore give
substantive names…”. (PP 274). And reality “means simply relation to our emotional
and active life…whatever excites and stimulates our interest is real” (PP 924). Our
capacity for attention to one thing rather than another is for James the sign of an
“active element in all consciousness,…a spiritual something…which seems to go out
to meet these qualities and contents, whilst they seem to come in to be received by
it.” (PP 285). Faced with the tension between scientific determinism and our belief
in our own freedom or autonomy, James—speaking not as a psychologist but as the
philosopher he had become—argues that science “must be constantly reminded that her
purposes are not the only purposes, and that the order of uniform causation which
she has use for, and is therefore right in postulating, may be enveloped in a wider
order, on which she has no claims at all” (PP 1179).

In his discussions of consciousness James appears at various times to be a

reductive materialist, a dualist, a proto-phenomenologist, and a neutral
psychologist who wouldn’t dare to consider philosophical questions. One of the most
original layers of The Principles lies in James’s pursuit of a “pure” description
of the stream of thought that does not presuppose it to be either mental or
material, a pursuit that anticipates not only his own later “radical empiricism,”
but Husserl’s phenomenology. In his chapter on “Sensation,” for example, James is
at pains to deny that sensations are “in the mind” and then “by a special act on
our part ‘extradited’ or ‘projected’ so as to appear located in an outer world” (PP
678). He argues that our original experiences are objective, that “only as
reflection becomes developed do we become aware of an inner world at all” (PP 679).
However, the objective world originally experienced is not the world of spatial
relations that we think:

Certainly a child newly born in Boston, who gets a sensation from the candle-
flame which lights the bedroom, or from his diaper-pin [who] does not feel either
of these objects to be situated in longitude 71 W. and latitude 42 N.….The flame
fills its own place, the pain fills its own place; but as yet these places are
neither identified with, nor discriminated from, any other places. That comes
later. For the places thus first sensibly known are elements of the child’s space-
world which remain with him all his life. (PP 681–2)

James’s chapter on “Habit,” early in the book, begins with habit as a physical
matter but ends by considering its ethical implications. James argues that the laws
of nature are themselves habits, “nothing but the immutable habits which the
different elementary sorts of matter follow in their actions and reactions upon
each other” (PP 109). In our brains, habits are paths of nervous energy, as rivers
and streams are the paths of water’s flow. At skin level, even a scar is a kind of
habit, “more likely to be abraded, inflamed, to suffer pain and cold, than are the
neighboring parts” (PP 111). On the psychological level as well, “any sequence of
mental action which has been frequently repeated, tends to perpetuate itself ...”
(PP 116). Habits are useful in diminishing the attention that we have to devote to
our actions, thereby allowing us to develop “our higher powers of mind” (PP 126).
On the social level, habit is “the enormous fly-wheel of society, its most precious
conservative agent. It alone is what keeps us all within the bounds of ordinance,
and saves the children of fortune from the envious uprisings of the poor” (PP 125).
The “ethical implications of the law of habit,” (PP 124) as James sees them,
concern which habits we choose to develop, and when. Many habits must begin early
in life: “Hardly ever is a language learned after twenty spoken without a foreign
accent” (PP 126). We should strive to make our “nervous system our ally instead of
our enemy” by forming as many good habits as we can, as early in life as we can.
Even later in life, we are to keep our capacity for resolution in shape by every
day or two doing “something for no other reason than that you would rather not do
it” (PP 130).

Two noteworthy chapters late in The Principles are “The Emotions” and “Will.” The
first sets out the theory—also enunciated by the Danish physiologist Carl Lange—
that emotion follows, rather than causes, its bodily expression: “Common-sense
says, we lose our fortune, are sorry and weep; we meet a bear, are frightened and
run; we are insulted by a rival, are angry and strike. The hypothesis here to be
defended says that this order of sequence is incorrect…that we feel sorry because
we cry, angry because we strike, afraid because we tremble…” (PP 1065–6). The
significance of this view, according to James, is that our emotions are tied in
with our bodily expressions. What, he asks, would grief be “without its tears, its
sobs, its suffocation of the heart, its pang in the breast-bone?” Not an emotion,
James answers, for a “purely disembodied human emotion is a nonentity” (PP 1068).

In his chapter on “Will” James opposes the theory of his contemporary Wilhelm Wundt
that there is one special feeling—a “feeling of innervation”—present in all
intentional action. In his survey of a range of cases, James finds that some
actions involve an act of resolve or of outgoing nervous energy, but others do not.
For example:

I sit at table after dinner and find myself from time to time taking nuts or
raisins out of the dish and eating them. My dinner properly is over, and in the
heat of the conversation I am hardly aware of what I do; but the perception of the
fruit, and the fleeting notion that I may eat it, seem fatally to bring the act
about. There is certainly no express fiat here;… (PP 1131).

The chapter on “Will” also contains striking passages that anticipate the concerns
of The Varieties of Religious Experience: about moods, “changes of heart,” and
“awakenings of conscience.” These, James observes, may affect the “whole scale of
values of our motives and impulses” (PP 1140).
4. Essays in Popular Philosophy

James’s popular and influential, The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular
Philosophy, published in 1897, collects previously published essays from the
previous nineteen years, including “The Sentiment of Rationality” (discussed
above), “The Dilemma of Determinism,” “Great Men and Their Environment” and “The
Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life.” The title essay—published just two years
earlier—proved to be controversial for seeming to recommend irresponsible or
irrationally held beliefs. James later wrote that he should have called the essay
“the right to believe,” to indicate his intent to justify holding certain beliefs
in certain circumstances, not to claim that we can (or should) believe things
simply by an act of will.

In science, James notes, we can afford to await the outcome of investigation before
coming to a belief, but in other cases we are “forced,” in that we must come to
some belief even if all the relevant evidence is not in. If I am on an isolated
mountain trail, faced with an icy ledge to cross, and do not know whether I can
make it, I may be forced to consider the question whether I can or should believe
that I can cross the ledge. This question is not only forced, it is “momentous”: if
I am wrong I may fall to my death, and if I believe rightly that I can cross the
ledge, my holding of the belief may itself contribute to my success. In such a
case, James asserts, I have the “right to believe”—precisely because such a belief
may help bring about the fact believed in. This is a case “where a fact cannot come
at all unless a preliminary faith exists in its coming” (WB, 25).

James applies his analysis to religious belief, particularly to the possible case
in which one’s salvation depends on believing in God in advance of any proof that
God exists. In such a case the belief may be justified by the outcome to which
having the belief leads. He extends his analysis beyond the religious domain,
however, to a wide range of secular human life:

A social organism of any sort is what it is because each member proceeds to his
own duty with a trust that the other members will simultaneously do theirs…. A
government, an army, a commercial system, a ship, a college, an athletic team, all
exist on this condition, without which not only is nothing achieved, but nothing is
even attempted (WB 24).

Moral questions too are both momentous and unlikely to be sustained by “sensible
proof.” They are not matters of science but of “what Pascal calls our heart” (WB
22). James defends our right to believe in certain answers to these questions
anyway.
Another essay in the collection, “Reflex Action and Theism,” attempts a
reconciliation of science and religion. James’s expression “reflex action” alludes
to the biological picture of the organism as responding to sensations with a series
of actions. In the higher animals a theoretical or thinking stage intervenes
between sensation and action, and this is where, in human beings, the thought of
God arises. James maintains that this thought is a natural human response to the
universe, independent of any proof that God exists, and he predicts that God will
be the “centre of gravity of all attempts to solve the riddle of life” (WB, 116).
He ends the essay by advocating a “theism” that posits “an ultimate opacity in
things, a dimension of being which escapes our theoretic control” (WB 143).

The Will to Believe also contains James’s most developed account of morality, “The
Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life.” Morality for James rests on sentience—
without it there are no moral claims and no moral obligations. But once sentience
exists, a claim is made, and morality gets “a foothold in the universe” (WB 198).
Although James insists that there is no common essence to morality, he does find a
guiding principle for ethical philosophy in the principle that we “satisfy at all
times as many demands as we can” (WB 205). This satisfaction is to be achieved by
working towards a “richer universe…the good which seems most organizable, most fit
to enter into complex combinations, most apt to be a member of a more inclusive
whole” (WB 210). This work proceeds by a series of experiments, by means of which
we have learned to live (for the most part) without “polygamy and slavery, private
warfare and liberty to kill, judicial torture and arbitrary royal power.” (WB
205) . However, James holds that there is “nothing final in any actually given
equilibrium of human ideals, [so that] as our present laws and customs have fought
and conquered other past ones, so they will in their turn be overthrown by any
newly discovered order which will hush up the complaints that they still give rise
to, without producing others louder still” (WB 206).

James’s essay “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings,” published in his Talks to
Teachers on Psychology and to Students on Some of Life’s Ideals in 1899,
illustrates another important element of James’s moral outlook. The blindness to
which James draws attention is that of one human being to another, a blindness he
illustrates with a story from his own life. Riding in the mountains of North
Carolina he comes upon a devastated landscape, with no trees, scars in the earth,
here and there a patch of corn growing in the sunlight. But after talking to the
settlers who had cleared the forest to make room for their farm, James comes to see
it their way (at least temporarily): not as devastation but as a manifestation of
“duty, struggle, and success.” James concludes: “I had been as blind to the
peculiar ideality of their conditions as they certainly would also have been to the
ideality of mine, had they had a peep at my strange indoor academic ways of life at
Cambridge” (TT 233–4). James portrays a plurality of outlooks in the essay to which
he attaches both a metaphysical/epistemological and an ethical import. This
plurality, he writes:

commands us to tolerate, respect, and indulge those whom we see harmlessly

interested and happy in their own ways, however unintelligible these may be to us.
Hands off: neither the whole of truth nor the whole of good is revealed to any
single observer, although each observer gains a partial superiority of insight from
the peculiar position in which he stands. Even prisons and sick-rooms have their
special revelations (TT 264).

Although “On a Certain Blindness” is about toleration and the appreciation of

different points of view, James sets out his own romantic point of view in his
choice of heroes in the essay: Wordsworth and Shelley, Emerson, and W. H. Hudson,
all of whom are said to have a sense of the “limitless significance in natural
things” (TT 244). Even in the city, there is “unfathomable significance and
importance” (TT 254) in the daily events of the streets, the river, and the crowds
of people. James praises Walt Whitman, “a hoary loafer,” for knowing how to profit
by life’s common opportunities: after a morning of writing and a bath, Whitman
rides the omnibus down Broadway from 23rd street to Bowling Green and back, just
for the pleasure and the spectacle of it. “[W]ho knows the more of truth,” James
asks, “Whitman on his omnibus-top, full of the inner joy with which the spectacle
inspires him, or you, full of the disdain which the futility of his occupation
excites?” (TT 252). James’s interest in the inner lives of others, and in writers
like Tolstoy who share his understanding of their “mysterious ebbs and flows” (TT
255), leads him to the prolonged study of human religious experience that he
presented as the Gifford Lectures in 1901–2, published as The Varieties of
Religious Experience in 1902.
5. The Varieties of Religious Experience

Like The Principles of Psychology, Varieties is “A Study in Human Nature,” as its

subtitle says. But at some five hundred pages it is only half the length of The
Principles of Psychology, befitting its more restricted, if still large, scope. For
James studies that part of human nature that is, or is related to, religious
experience. His interest is not in religious institutions, ritual, or, even for the
most part, religious ideas, but in “the feelings, acts, and experiences of
individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in
relation to whatever they may consider the divine” (V 31).

James sets out a central distinction of the book in early chapters on “The Religion
of Healthy-Mindedness” and “The Sick Soul.” The healthy-minded religious person—
Walt Whitman is one of James’s main examples—has a deep sense of “the goodness of
life,” (V 79) and a soul of “sky-blue tint” (V 80). Healthy-mindedness can be
involuntary, just natural to someone, but often comes in more willful forms.
Liberal Christianity, for example, represents the triumph of a resolute devotion to
healthy-mindedness over a morbid “old hell-fire theology” (V 91). James also cites
the “mind-cure movement” of Mary Baker Eddy, for whom “evil is simply a lie, and
any one who mentions it is a liar” (V 107). For “The Sick Soul,” in contrast,
“radical evil gets its innings” (V 163). No matter how secure one may feel, the
sick soul finds that “[u]nsuspectedly from the bottom of every fountain of
pleasure, as the old poet said, something bitter rises up: a touch of nausea, a
falling dead of the delight, a whiff of melancholy….” These states are not simply
unpleasant sensations, for they bring “a feeling of coming from a deeper region and
often have an appalling convincingness” (V 136). James’s main examples are Leo
Tolstoy’s “My Confession,” John Bunyan’s autobiography, and a report of terrifying
“dread”—allegedly from a French correspondent but actually from James himself. Some
sick souls never get well, while others recover or even triumph: these are the
“twice-born.” In chapters on “The Divided Self, and the Process of Its Unification”
and on “Conversion,” James discusses St. Augustine, Henry Alline, Bunyan, Tolstoy,
and a range of popular evangelists, focusing on what he calls “the state of
assurance” (V 247) they achieve. Central to this state is “the loss of all the
worry, the sense that all is ultimately well with one, the peace, the harmony, the
willingness to be, even though the outer conditions should remain the same” (V
248).

Varieties’ classic chapter on “Mysticism” offers “four marks which, when an

experience has them, may justify us in calling it mystical…” (V 380). The first is
ineffability: “it defies expression…its quality must be directly experienced; it
cannot be imparted or transferred to others.” Second is a “noetic quality”:
mystical states present themselves as states of knowledge. Thirdly, mystical states
are transient; and, fourth, subjects are passive with respect to them: they cannot
control their coming and going. Are these states, James ends the chapter by asking,
“windows through which the mind looks out upon a more extensive and inclusive
world[?]” (V 428).

In chapters entitled “Philosophy”—devoted in large part to pragmatism—and

“Conclusions,” James finds that religious experience is on the whole useful, even
“amongst the most important biological functions of mankind,” but he concedes that
this does not make it true. Nevertheless, James articulates his own belief—which he
does not claim to prove—that religious experiences connect us with a greater, or
further, reality not accessible in our normal cognitive relations to the world:
“The further limits of our being plunge, it seems to me, into an altogether other
dimension of existence from the sensible and merely ‘understandable’ world” (V
515).
6. Late Writings
Pragmatism (1907)

James first announced his commitment to pragmatism in a lecture at Berkeley in

1898, entitled “Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results.” Later sources for
Pragmatism were lectures at Wellesley College in 1905, and at the Lowell Institute
and Columbia University in 1906 and 1907. Pragmatism emerges in James’s book as six
things: a philosophical temperament, a theory of truth, a theory of meaning, a
holistic account of knowledge, a metaphysical view, and a method of resolving
philosophical disputes.

The pragmatic temperament appears in the book’s opening chapter, where (following a
method he first set out in “Remarks on Spencer’s Definition of Mind as
Correspondence”) James classifies philosophers according to their temperaments: in
this case “tough-minded” or “tender-minded.” The pragmatist is the mediator between
these extremes, someone, like James himself, with “scientific loyalty to facts,”
but also “the old confidence in human values and the resultant spontaneity, whether
of the religious or romantic type” (P 17). The method of resolving disputes and the
theory of meaning are on display in James’s discussion of an argument about whether
a man chasing a squirrel around a tree goes around the squirrel too. Taking meaning
as the “conceivable effects of a practical kind the object may involve,” the
pragmatist philosopher finds that two “practical” meanings of “go around” are in
play: either the man goes North, East, South, and West of the squirrel, or he faces
first the squirrel’s head, then one of his sides, then his tail, then his other
side. “Make the distinction,” James writes, “and there is no occasion for any
further dispute.”

The pragmatic theory of truth is the subject of the book’s sixth (and to some
degree its second) chapter. Truth, James holds, is “a species of the good,” like
health. Truths are goods because we can “ride” on them into the future without
being unpleasantly surprised. They “lead us into useful verbal and conceptual
quarters as well as directly up to useful sensible termini. They lead to
consistency, stability and flowing human intercourse. They lead away from
excentricity and isolation, from foiled and barren thinking” (103). Although James
holds that truths are “made” (104) in the course of human experience, and that for
the most part they live “on a credit system” in that they are not currently being
verified, he also holds the empiricistic view that “beliefs verified concretely by
somebody are the posts of the whole superstructure” (P 100).

James’s chapter on “Pragmatism and Humanism” sets out his voluntaristic

epistemology. “We carve out everything,” James states, “just as we carve out
constellations, to serve our human purposes” (P, 100). Nevertheless, he recognizes
“resisting factors in every experience of truth-making” (P, 117), including not
only our present sensations or experiences but the whole body of our prior beliefs.
James holds neither that we create our truths out of nothing, nor that truth is
entirely independent of humanity. He embraces “the humanistic principle: you can’t
weed out the human contribution” (P, 122). He also embraces a metaphysics of
process in the claim that “for pragmatism [reality] is still in the making,”
whereas for “rationalism reality is ready-made and complete from all eternity” (P
123). Pragmatism’s final chapter on “Pragmatism and Religion” follows James’s line
in Varieties in attacking “transcendental absolutism” for its unverifiable account
of God, and in defending a “pluralistic and moralistic religion” (144)based on
human experience. “On pragmatistic principles,” James writes, “if the hypothesis of
God works satisfactorily in the widest sense of the word, it is true” (143).
A Pluralistic Universe (1909)

Originally delivered in Oxford as a set of lectures “On the Present Situation in

Philosophy,” James begins his book, as he had begun Pragmatism, with a discussion
of the temperamental determination of philosophical theories, which, James states,
“are just so many visions, modes of feeling the whole push … forced on one by one’s
total character and experience, and on the whole preferred—there is no other
truthful word—as one’s best working attitude” (PU 15). Maintaining that a
philosopher’s “vision” is “the important thing” about him (PU 3), James condemns
the “over-technicality and consequent dreariness of the younger disciples at our
American universities…” (PU 13).

James passes from critical discussions of Josiah Royce’s idealism and the “vicious
intellectualism” of Hegel to philosophers whose visions he admires: Gustav Fechner
and Henri Bergson. He praises Fechner for holding that “the whole universe in its
different spans and wave-lengths, exclusions and developments, is everywhere alive
and conscious” (PU, 70), and he seeks to refine and justify Fechner’s idea that
separate human, animal and vegetable consciousnesses meet or merge in a
“consciousness of still wider scope” (72). James employs Henri Bergson’s critique
of “intellectualism” to argue that the “concrete pulses of experience appear pent
in by no such definite limits as our conceptual substitutes are confined by. They
run into one another continuously and seem to interpenetrate” (PU 127). James
concludes by embracing a position that he had more tentatively set forth in The
Varieties of Religious Experience: that religious experiences “point with
reasonable probability to the continuity of our consciousness with a wider
spiritual environment from which the ordinary prudential man (who is the only man
that scientific psychology, so called, takes cognizance of) is shut off” (PU 135).
Whereas in Pragmatism James subsumes the religious within the pragmatic (as yet
another way of successfully making one’s way through the world), in A Pluralistic
Universe he suggests that the religious offers a superior relation to the universe.
Essays in Radical Empiricism (1912)

This posthumous collection includes James’s groundbreaking essays on “pure

experience,” originally published in 1904–5. James’s fundamental idea is that mind
and matter are both aspects of, or structures formed from, a more fundamental stuff
—pure experience—that (despite being called “experience”) is neither mental nor
physical. Pure experience, James explains, is “the immediate flux of life which
furnishes the material to our later reflection with its conceptual categories… a
that which is not yet any definite what, tho’ ready to be all sorts of whats…” (ERE
46). That “whats” pure experience may be are minds and bodies, people and material
objects, but this depends not on a fundamental ontological difference among these
“pure experiences,” but on the relations into which they enter. Certain sequences
of pure experiences constitute physical objects, and others constitute persons; but
one pure experience (say the perception of a chair) may be part both of the
sequence constituting the chair and of the sequence constituting a person. Indeed,
one pure experience might be part of two distinct minds, as James explains in a
chapter entitled “How Two Minds Can Know One Thing.”

James’s “radical empiricism” is distinct from his “pure experience” metaphysics. It

is never precisely defined in the Essays, and is best explicated by a passage from
The Meaning of Truth where James states that radical empiricism consists of a
postulate, a statement of fact, and a conclusion. The postulate is that “the only
things that shall be debatable among philosophers shall be things definable in
terms drawn from experience,” the fact is that relations are just as directly
experienced as the things they relate, and the conclusion is that “the parts of
experience hold together from next to next by relations that are themselves parts
of experience” (MT, 6–7).

James was still working on objections to his “pure experience” doctrine, replying
to critics of Pragmatism, and writing an introduction to philosophical problems
when he died in 1910. His legacy extends into psychology and the study of religion,
and in philosophy not only throughout the pragmatist tradition that he founded
(along with Charles Peirce), but into phenomenology and analytic philosophy. Edmund
Husserl incorporated James’s notions of the “fringe” and “halo” into his
phenomenology (Moran, pp. 276–80), Bertrand Russell’s The Analysis of Mind is
indebted to James’s doctrine of “pure experience,” (Russell, 1921, pp. 22–6),
Ludwig Wittgenstein learned about “the absence of the will act” from James’s
Psychology (Goodman, Wittgenstein and William James, p. 81), and the versions of
“neopragmatism” set out by Nelson Goodman, Richard Rorty and Hilary Putnam are
saturated with James’s ideas. James is one of the most attractive and endearing of
philosophers: for his vision of a “wild,” “open” universe that is nevertheless
shaped by our human powers and answers to some of our deepest needs, but also, as
Russell observed in his obituary, because of the “large tolerance and … humanity”
with which he sets that vision out. (The Nation (3 September 1910: 793–4).
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